This is one of the most powerful essays I've ever read: "Some Thoughts On Mercy" by Ross Gay
The Sun Magazine -- http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/451/some_thoughts_on_mercy?page=1
I shudder at the emotional and psychic burden we’ve laid on the young black and brown New Yorkers — so many of them children — being profiled in that city’s “stop-and-frisk” program. One man featured in a New York Times video speaks with courage and dignity about having been stopped as a teenager “at least sixty to seventy times.” Another, in a video made by The Nation, talks about having been roughed up for “looking suspicious” and called a “mutt.” Eighty-seven percent of stop-and-frisk targets are black or Latino, though blacks and Latinos constitute only about half of New York City’s population. How, when their city believes them to be criminal, do these young people escape believing the same of themselves?
Isn’t it, for them, for us, a gargantuan task not to imagine that everyone is imagining us as criminal? A nearly impossible task? What a waste, a corruption, of the imagination. Time and again we think the worst of anyone perceiving us: walking through the antique shop; standing in front of the lecture hall; entering the bank; considering whether or not to go camping someplace or another; driving to the hardware store; being pulled over by the police. Or, for the black and brown kids in New York City, simply walking down the street every day of their lives. The imagination, rather than being cultivated for connection or friendship or love, is employed simply for some crude version of survival. This corruption of the imagination afflicts all of us: we’re all violated by it. I certainly know white people who worry, Does he think I think what he thinks I think? And in this way, moments of potential connection are fraught with suspicion and all that comes with it: fear, anger, paralysis, disappointment, despair. We all think the worst of each other and ourselves, and become our worst selves.
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We all exist, mostly unwittingly, in a world of illusions with all-too-real consequences. Too often we exist, as Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man says, as “phantom[s] in other people’s minds.” The title of poet Cornelius Eady’s book Brutal Imagination, about the Susan Smith murders, says it all. Smith drowned her two children, then conjured (from her imagination) a black carjacker to explain their disappearance. The main speaker throughout Brutal Imagination is that black phantom, made of our culture’s fears, just as we are made of each other’s fears. Eady says in the poem “My Heart”: “Susan Smith has invented me because / Nobody else in town will do what / She needs me to do.” And later in the same poem: “Since her fear is my blood / And her need part mythical, / Every thing she says about me is true.”
But what if we acknowledged those fears, regardless of how awful or shameful they are? What if we acknowledged this country’s terrible and ongoing history of imagining its own citizens — indigenous, black, Japanese American, Arab American, Latino — as monsters? What if we acknowledged the drug war, and the resulting mass incarceration of African Americans, and the myriad intermediate crimes against citizens and communities as a product of our fears? And what if we thereby had to reevaluate our sense of justice and the laws and procedures and beliefs that constitute it? What if we honestly assessed what we have come to believe about ourselves and each other, and how those beliefs shape our lives? And what if we did it with generosity and forgiveness? What if we did it with mercy?
FULL ESSAY: http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/451/some_thoughts_on_mercy?page=1
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